In this episode, Nicole had the privilege of speaking with Asaf Avidan Antonir, the co-founder of Onyx. Onyx is an app that tracks your movement through the use of your phone from the entirety of your workout to provide you with real-time coaching around your personal performance movement, execution, alignment, and much more. Essentially Onyx is solving for the one-dimensional coaching that is typically experienced within an on-demand setting.
The Onyx technology allows you to step just a little bit closer to that in-person experience that’s usually only felt during a personal training session or group fitness class. Hear how their technology is giving a new meaning to the word personalization.
Podcast Highlights
5:08 – Making exercise more accessible: “The idea was how do we make it a lot more accessible? How do we bring it to all these other exercises that we care about? How do we also take it a step further and even introduce form feedback and all those things that even these other solutions didn’t have? It was very clear to us that computer vision would sort of be the solution to that.”
9:16 – How does Onyx learn?: “We have a feedback loop. One is our users giving us feedback, but there’s also the fact that we are collecting very basic information at every single workout. So we have tens of thousands of users doing these workouts and for every workout, we save all of this kind of high-level information that allows us to understand.”
16:20 – Onyx’s leaderboard and visual components: “We think that the social aspect of fitness is so important so we really wanted to include that leaderboard. And obviously, when you’re on a mobile experience, it might be difficult to show the leaderboard and the video and the metrics and all of these things. And so we really give you the flexibility to see what it is that you want.”
25:20 – Starting with the basic body movements: “How do we just start simple, start general, and learn what users want, learn which aspects of our experience provide the most value. And then from there prioritize which exercises or which new modalities we want to jump into.”
28:46 – Personalization is the core of Onyx: “Personalization is really at the core of what we’re doing. Today that starts with that real-time personalization workout. Long-term we think the biggest opportunity is really allowing anyone in the world to have that kind of truly personalized fitness experience, the way that a trainer would do for them in real life.”
49:15 – Onyx’s free content: “We will pick three or four workouts that are free every single week. So you can actually work out several days, a week, completely for free, and those are alternating. Also, all of our challenges are totally free, both the long-term challenges and the social ones.”
